My paternal grandmother and I didn't share a surname in any part of the 37 years we were simultaneously alive. By the time I was born both she and my father's father had moved on to second spouses; Granny seemed to have found the love of her life in Granddad Joe. He "passed away" as they say when I was 16 and Brother was 14 and I don't remember Joe Blanton ever being as ornery or inappropriate as Granny's outlandish recollections of him would've had us believe. I still reckon some of the brief anecdotes she often shared about him were reflections of her own ribald sense of humor. Or maybe there was some shared darkness that had drawn them together in the first place. 

 

Brother and I would go around quoting her more colorful expressions and our Momma would tell us not to be repeating that, turning her face to hide creeping laughter before she got the half-hearted scold all the way out of her mouth. Dad was generally oblivious to such things but even so, and even considering his years' worth of daily earfuls of similar talk growing up under Granny's purview, we opted for the versions she used when our uptight aunt was around: "shhhht" and "S.O.B." were examples.

 

After I moved away from our town, a good decade after Granny had become a widow, she'd send me letters every few months about home, about her activities, about what was going on at Cherry Lane Missionary Baptist Church, about what my aunts and uncles and cousins had been up to. These were free of Joe reminiscences, of cuss words, of proclaiming that she wouldn't give the tinkle off her hind end for a product advertised on TV. She'd lived through the Dust Bowl and the McCarthy era and more than one war and by God she knew what not to put on paper. For whatever reason I kept only one of these letters, the last I would ever receive from her. I don't recall being conscious at the time of what I presently view as an account of a premonitory occurrence, but now in year three of the Shuffle I often wonder if her other missives had included little forewarnings all along. Granny's talents were great and varied, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn the gift of portent was among them. But really the part about the birds is straight reportage. I've read this letter so many times over the years that I can recite it from memory, which comes in handy now the original is long gone. The pharma doesn't affect my memory like it does some of the others' here and I'm glad of that. Or maybe it has affected my memory and I'll never know and neither will you.

 

"Dear Granddaughter," the shakily-handwritten letter begins, as did many of the others,

 

 

Later she catches me up on the family goings-on. This portion makes up about half of the three lined pages and includes not the first-ever admonishment of her eldest son and his wife – my uncle and aunt – who

 

 

Then an update on a special project she's managing for the Women's Missionary Auxiliary at her church.

 

 

Then toward the end is the part about the birds.

 

 

A year and a half later, when high temps in the summer were beginning to push past 120º Fahrenheit, there were very few birds left around there apart from buzzards and crows. Gulls, eventually, in the lake areas. The pigeons that had made their way into rural southwest Arkansas – oh, they made Momma nervous – hung on for a while too and they were some of the last to go. There were many people there who'd never in their lives seen a pigeon in person and suddenly farmers were hearing a cooing sort of cluck, discovering dozens of the birds perched on scarecrows and plow equipment like their own personal Hitchcock movie. Still it wasn't until Brother texted me a picture of a pile of a hundred or so dead pigeons amassed in a corner of his carport, a furrowed shades-of-gray mass dotted with wide-open orange eyes, that I thought back to Granny's letter.

 

I think of Granny a lot lately. When the days or nights are cold I cover myself in a quilt she made me out of several pairs of old jeans I wore in high school. This is the heaviest and sturdiest of the two counterpanes I have in my Living Unit, and (due I understand to a bedding shortage, one of many scarcities, you see what this is written on) the only item from Before that I have with me day-to-day. The tufts of tack thread in the joined corners of the faded blue squares have grown soft with age and use, and feel richly comforting between my fingers when I absentmindedly twirl them, looking into the dark and thinking of Granny Earlene and my other grandparents (all definitely dead) and my parents (probably dead) and my brother and cousins and "exotic places" I'll never get to visit again even if they are all still where I left them. I think of growing old and having no one, though unlike my bitter uncle's situation the choice is not all mine. And just as the pharma kicks in and the itching subsides and my body won't allow my eyes to stay open any longer I think of a dot of red on a tiny beak, of Granny Earlene caring enough to bury a small creature that met an untimely end.